Tag Archives: corporate performance management

We are all familiar with the famous rule – ‘it takes 21 days to form a new habit’. If you can just stick to those 21 days, resist the temptation or keep up the effort (in accordance with the habit that you’re trying to form), you’ll be fine. Well… apparently you won’t. And this is actually a good thing.

A public survey released by Deloitte (quoted by the Harvard Business Review here) more than half the executives surveyed said that their current performance management approach didn’t result in high performance or in increased employee engagement. Those surveyed are not alone – and the most recent announcement was that Accenture was getting rid of annual performance rankings and reviews. But wasn’t performance management – with all employees then rated on a bell curve – considered as a best practice for optimal organizational management? Let’s look at the drivers behind this new understanding of performance.

Accenture has 330,000 employees – and managers spend thousands of hours on getting trained on performance management and following the practice. What’s behind this huge departure from tradition, and what does it mean for the future of performance management?

Liz Ryan, Founder and CEO of Human Workplace, tells us in a LinkedIn post that employee engagement is a scam.

Here’s a quote from her LinkedIn post “The Employee Engagement Scam”

“Employee engagement is a fake business term that cropped up about twenty years ago because consulting firms and software firms saw something new that they could scam leaders into measuring.

Measurement is an addiction for fearful business and institutional weenies. They can’t stop measuring things because it makes them feel that they’re in control. When the measurements hit established targets, they feel cozy inside.

Employee engagement is typically measured via a once-a-year employee survey. The employees get to fill out a survey to tell their management team how ‘engaged’ they are, as though ‘engagement’ were a real thing instead of a made-up construct devised to give HR people something to measure.”